Beginning Android 2

by Mark L. Murphy

Book Overview

The Android development platform, created by Google and the Open Handset Alliance, is a platform in its truest sense, encompassing hundreds of classes beyond the traditional Java classes and open source components that ship with the SDK.

With Beginning Android 2, you'll learn how to develop applications for Android 2.x mobile devices, using simple examples that are ready to run with your copy of the software development kit. Author, Android...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1430226293
• ISBN13: 9781430226291
• Release Date: March 2010
• Publisher: Apress
• Length: 416 Pages
• Weight: 1.64 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 7.6" x 9.3"

Customer Reviews

Very Helpful Book

Much like the other reviews say, this isn't a book for beginners. Make sure you can set up Android SDK and your IDE, if you need one,(eclipse, netbeans, etc...) before you even think about getting this book. I don't know tons about Java yet but you really do need at least a good understanding to get start with this book and besides if you don't know any Java you aren't going to make anything to impressive. I'm learning Java through school on the side so I figured I could work on Android stuff as I learned more about Java. All in all I highly recommend this book, I don't really have it to compare against any other Android teaching book but this one is doing the trick for me. I know for sure that when I finish this book I will definitely move on to the other Android books in this series.

Learning Android at the Perfect Pace

This book is definitely for someone that has some experience with Java. I bought this book, because of the other reader's comments. I enjoyed the fact that this books wastes no time diving straight into your first Android project rather than wasting time reviewing Java syntax. After two days of reading this book, I was able to create a nice UI using XML layouts, communicate with my REST web services on the Internet, and store user data in SQLite.

Perfect to jump-start your new project - if you are ready

For those who criticized this book on the basis of "not for beginners". The title of this book is not "Beginning Java", or "Beginning OO", or "Beginning program mining ...", etc. It's "Beginning Android", so it assumes that you already know all of the above. And, for somebody who already knows the necessary pre-requisites, and needs ready code samples to jump-start his/her new project, this book is perfect.

So far so good

I just recently bought this book and it is a solid introduction to Android. However, please understand that this book makes 2 assumptions: 1. You have a decent understanding of how to code Java SE and OO concepts such as inheritance, encapsulation, etc. 2. You have already set up your Android environment be it via command line or through Eclipse. If your experience is like mine you probably will use a little of both types of setups to get things going. I found the eclipse simulator set up horribly slow to boot up once you have created it using eclipse. I had to use the command line version to see code I ran. With that said I think this book provides a nice start and covers enough topics to give you at least a taste of what Android can do. I will buy the follow up Pro Android 2 once I have completed this book. This book flows pretty quickly and is small (370 or so pages) compared to most books like this that can easily go above and beyond 700 pages. Again if you have a decent grasp of Java and OO concepts, I would suggest trying this book out if you are interested in trying your hand at Android 2 development.

Great Book

I liked this book. It got me going and that's the goal. I found it intuitive and easy to follow. There is a web site with the source code and that's great. In my opinion you can't go wrong with this book. Remember that you must know Java before tackling Android. This is not a teach you Java and Android beginner book. Its a Android beginners book.